These days, the NBA always schedules its Christmas Day games to be marquee matchups, with announcers copiously throwing around phrases like "playoff preview" during the broadcast. But historically, how often have holiday combatants actually gone on to meet again in the postseason? And when they did meet, how often did the Christmas winner repeat their victory?

Here are all 33 instances in NBA/ABA/BAA history where a Christmas game foreshadowed a playoff matchup:

Since there were 220 Christmas Day games in NBA/ABA/BAA history prior to this year, that means 15% have resulted in playoff rematches (with the Christmas winner winning the series 63.6% of the time).

However, the league has been more conscious of scheduling major showdowns on the holiday in recent years; in the 1980s, the rematch rate was 13%, but it was 31% in the 1990s and 27% in the 2000s. And since the 1990s, 52.4% of Christmas Day slates have contained at least one matchup that was reprised in the playoffs (55% since 2000). With the league expanding the Christmas schedule to a record 5 games in recent seasons, the odds are higher than ever that we'll see at least one of Saturday's matchups get revisited in May or June.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 27th, 2010 at 11:30 am and is filed under Analysis, History, Holidays, Playoffs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.